Swiss Give Mexico Bank Files Linked to the Former President

By TIM WEINER

Published: November 29, 2002

MEXICO CITY, Nov. 28—
More than $100 million is sitting frozen in a Swiss bank account once controlled by Raúl Salinas, the brother of a former president of Mexico. Now, after seven years, the source of those millions may become clear.

On Wednesday, Swiss officials handed over to Mexico's government thousands of pages of files from a long but unresolved money-laundering investigation of the Salinas account.

No one -- not the Swiss, nor the Mexicans nor United States officials -- has ever figured out the origin of the money. The Swiss suspect it came from cocaine deals, in which Mr. Salinas offered drug kingpins high-level protection for their shipments. Mexican investigators think it might have flowed from a secret fund traditionally controlled by presidents of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ran Mexico from 1929 until 2000.

The answer is crucial for that party, which is already trying to extinguish smoldering suspicions that it skimmed tens of millions from the state-run oil company, Pemex, to finance its failed 2000 presidential campaign.

If the money trail can indeed be traced from Switzerland to the party's headquarters, rather than to a cocaine stash, its leaders may have a harder time refurbishing their image. They are striving to regain power from President Vicente Fox, the first political outsider to defeat them.

Mr. Salinas, 56, has been in a maximum-security prison since 1995, serving a 27-year sentence for ordering the murder of his brother-in-law, who was the Institutional Revolutionary Party's secretary general.

His brother, Carlos Salinas, who served as president from 1988 to 1994, lives in self-imposed exile in Ireland.

Raúl Salinas has always maintained that the money came from legitimate business deals, in which Mexican businessmen and investors entrusted him with their funds.

''I have suffered the consequences of manufactured evidence, bought-and-paid-for testimony, and the conspiracy of Mexican authorities,'' he said in a letter from prison this week.

The Swiss -- whose banking laws had long shielded billions stolen by governments or dictators, including the Nazis, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines -- began to cooperate with international investigations during the 1990's.

In the Salinas case, the trail has been traced from an account in Zurich through an elaborate labyrinth.

The $103 million in Switzerland was held in the name of a Cayman Islands shell corporation, Trocca Ltd., secretly controlled by Mr. Salinas.

The money arrived there from Citibank's private-banking subsidiary in New York, which managed an account for Mr. Salinas and his third wife, Paulina Castañón.

Ms. Castañón had wired the millions to New York from a Citibank branch in Mexico City under a false name, Patricia Ríos. That money had been transferred into dollars from cashier's checks she obtained at Mexican banks.

But where did that money come from? There the trail ended, until now.

Mexico agreed last June to take over the case after Swiss investigators said they had done what they could and that further work was needed in Mexico ''to clarify beyond doubt the origin of the assets,'' according to a statment from the Swiss Federal Office of Justice.